Candid and sometimes scathing memoirs from the Oscar-award-winning screenwriter of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. On the Contrary is a Proustian parade of people and events (including Thatcher and the Falklands war), written with the vividness and...

Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters – these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds. Julia Reinhard...

"The Stranger" is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as at likely to be fou...

"The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature" tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten...

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the...

"The Wind in the Willows" has its origins in the bedtime stories that Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair and then continued in letters (now held in the Bodleian Library) while he was on holiday. But the book developed into something much more s...

"In the Quiet Season & Other Stories" explores the human landscape of Alaska. While the stories take place in modern-day towns, each is laced with a timelessness that comes from their roots in ageless issues: broken trust and heartbreak, hope and reb...

The curious paradox of romance is that, throughout its history, this genre has been dismissed as trivial and unintellectual, yet people have never ceased to flock to it with enthusiasm and even fervor. In contemporary contexts, we devour popular roma...

What words come to mind when we think of God? Merciful? Just? Compassionate? In fact, the Bible lays out Gods primary qualities clearly: jealous, petty, unforgiving, bloodthirsty, vindictive – and worse. Originally conceived as a joint presentation b...

This unique literary collection offers a window on the contemporary Levant, a region comprising most of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, parts of southern Turkey and northwestern Iraq, and the Sinai Peninsula. Originally written in...